The Omnibeast

This tweet piqued my interest in how Dawkins might have described the omnibeast worshipped by so many.

@sandrider69: @RichardDawkins I have just read the opening salvo of Chapter 2 The God Delusion. There cannot be a more entertaining paragraph anywhere!

Excerpted from “The God Delusion”, by Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.

Those two sentences from that paragraph ring true. Dawkins accurately describes characteristics of the omnibeast as it and its acts are described in its own holy anthology.

It still gives me pause to experience the high degree of denial, dismissal, and irrational reasoning necessary to describe the beast as king, gentle, and loving. Amazing.